Ethiopia toughens crack down on corruption following mass protests

ADDIS ABABA, Aug. 16– In what appears to be a concrete answer
to the preoccupations of the public, the Ethiopian government is
undertaking its large scale anti-corruption investigation and arrest during
the past few weeks.

During the crack down, 56 senior government officials, businessperson
and middlemen were arrested in less than a month. The Ethiopian Ministry
of Government Communication Affairs Office has indicated that the
large-scale anti-corruption investigation and arrest of high-profile
individuals is part of the Ethiopian government’s reform agenda, which was
started at the end of 2016 following mass protests in different parts of
the country. The Ethiopian government has since then stressed
bad-governance and corruption among the major reasons for the
preoccupations of the public that rocked the east African country back in
late 2016. Even though Ethiopians have witnessed their country’s economy
growing as one of the fastest economies in the world with double-digit
economic growth for consecutive years, challenges attributed to
bad-governance and corruption have led to violence during the last quarter
of 2016.

The Ethiopian government, in its response to the public anger, had
reshuffled majority of its senior officials and ministers soon after the
declaration of the state of emergency back in October last year. The
Ethiopian House of Peoples’ Representatives (Ethiopian Parliament), soon
after the violence, had also endorsed the Ethiopian Prime Minister
Hailemariam Desalegn’s proposal of the appointment of new cabinet members.
The prime minister, who had promised the general public to reshuffle his
government, has introduced new cabinet members, of which only 9 of the
ministers in the 30-member cabinet remained in their previous positions.
The government reshuffle process was soon followed by training government
officials on good-governance and leadership.

Desalegn, in his message to the first batch of 470 high-level leadership
cadres, stressed that leaders have to work hard to address concerns of good
governance with the help of the ongoing reform process, which is designed
to give a new impetus to the country’s aspiration to realize targets in its
second five-year Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP-II). The Ethiopian
government, which had promised to take the reform process further with
large scale investigations, started the arrest of high-level government
officials and their associates last month.As the large-scale investigation
is still underway in the east African country, the number of suspected
government officials and their associates could still rise. Investigators
also froze the assets of 210 individuals and 15 companies that have link
with the recently arrested individuals.

Majority of the 56 defendants have so far appeared before the Ethiopian
court, including former Deputy Minister of Finance and Economic
Cooperation, Alemayehu Gujo, the former Manager of Addis Ababa Roads
Authority, Fekade Haile, and former head of Ethiopian Roads Authority Zayid
WoldeGebrel. Ethiopian roads authority Communications Director, Samson
Wondimu, is the latest Ethiopian government official detained on Friday in
connection with the large scale anti-corruption investigation in Ethiopia’s
modern history.Other senior government officials from the Ethiopian Roads
Authority, the Addis Ababa Roads Authority, the Ethiopian Sugar Corporation
and some foreign nationals were also arrested during the crack down.- XINHUA